He is the follower, the listener, the least bold. Tsukuru is the only one among his friends who isn’t given a color. Tsukuru remembers how Shiro’s “calves were like glazed porcelain, white and smooth.” The piece is part of “Years of Pilgrimage,” a series of suites Liszt composed after traveling. Maybe I’m just color-blind.One of them, Shiro, a pianist, liked to play Liszt’s “Le mal du pays” (“Homesickness”). I know other readers can see color in the white space, but to me Murakami’s prose remains just as flat and Tsukuru’s affect remains just as empty. Tsukuru excavates a mountain of drama and backstory out of his blankness, but he still stares at it just as blankly. Murakami tells us he does–but I’m not convinced. The question is whether in the process he becomes a whole person. Tsukuru does find out why his friends turned on him, but I won’t spoil it. “You can hide memories,” Sara says, “but you can’t erase the history that produced them.”

And psychoanalytically speaking, there’s no such thing as blankness–it’s a sign that something has been buried that the conscious mind thinks it can’t face. Maybe what he saw as absences, they saw as positives: he wasn’t blank he was calm, polite and relaxing to be around. He starts to wonder if he was blank only to himself, if his friends saw qualities in him that he couldn’t. So he unearths his old pals–and their secrets.īy delving into the past, Tsukuru delves into his own blankness to see how deep it goes, what it means and what it might be concealing. His girlfriend Sara–whose attraction to him is, once again, hard to explain–says he will never be a whole person until he finds out what happened. That abandonment has haunted Tsukuru ever since. One day, with no explanation, they told him they’d never speak to him again. “I don’t even have anything to offer myself.” In high school, he had four close friends, each of whose last names contained a word for a color.

“I basically have nothing to offer to others,” he thinks. He’s content in his work but dogged by a sense that he has no personality.

He lives in Tokyo and is unmarried and virtually friendless. Tsukuru is a 36-year-old engineer who designs train stations. He cops to the emptiness of his hero right up front: “Everything about him was middling, pallid, lacking in color.” But what intrigued me about his latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, is that it’s explicitly about that blankness. He’s widely beloved, but the persistent flatness of his prose and the passivity and blankness of his protagonists have always irked me, all the more so because said passivity and blankness in no way deter other characters from wanting to sleep with them. I’m an outlier on Haruki Murakami, I know.

Murakami colourless